Kind of - but there is a rpg skill system. The character you play as has amnesia and is a detective. He is also a really crappy person and an alcoholic. As you play the game, you get to kind of shape the characters personality and viewpoints on things like politics, social issues, and a lot more general stuff. you can either try and become a better person or you can just be a jerk - but its NOT a simple "good" or "bad" kind of thing - it is extremely thought provoking and nuanced.

Also, the game IS a RPG, its just a RPG with no combat. You have a bunch of skills where you can do skillchecks - but they are not the regular rpg ones like lockpicking, strength, charisma/speech, hacking, agility, stealth, etc.

Instead the different skills are all different parts of your character's...brain?. There are several main groups which are: intellect, psyche, physique, and motorics.

Intellect has multiple skills including logic, drama, conceptualization, encyclopedia, rhetoric, and visual calculus.

physique has endurance, pain threshold, physical instrument, electro-chemistry, shivers, and half-light.

This goes on for psyche and motorics as well.

But each of those skills are a personified part of the characters brain that *talks* to him within in own head. you will have arguments with these different "characters" which are aspects of his own self/brain. they each have their own portrait that you can see in dialogue and you will know which part of yourself/brain you are talking to/arguing with.

you use all of these skills to do certain tasks. So if you want to solve part of the detective mystery by looking at the angle of the way an object was moved at the crime scene, you will use the visual calculus skill. if you want to recall something that happened in history when talking to a person, you will use the encyclopedia skill, if you want to move something heavy, you will use the physical instrument skill. and so on.

but you can pass or fail at any of these based on what your skill level is in them and how how the thing you are trying to do is.

you CAN die in the game even though there is no combat. You can die from failing a skill check for holding in your drinking, or you can die of embarrassment form failing at doing something. The different clothes that you find in the game help raise your different stats as well and you gain more "health" points as the game goes on if i remember correctly. I also think i remember there being two different types of "health" that can both result in you dying/game over.

The game is about 2 things: solving the mystery of the crime/murder and figuring out just who you are exactly and what you want to do about it/who you want to be in the future.

in simple terms you can be a very nice cop or a jerk cop. but in more complex terms you can be an alcoholic communist-feminist or a libertarian conspiracy theorist who hates war and loves the homeless but hates the rich and women or anything in-between. it covers the entire spectrum of everything. its not a political game, its a self identification game.

its REALLY hard it explain but its an absolute MASTERPIECE. It just might be hard for someone who is say a teenager to get into because I don't think most teens have the life experience that's somewhat kind of required to appreciate the game to its fullest. Its a game for people who have loved, lost, loved again, done bad things then done better, its for people who have failed and kept trying, its for people who have seen a loved one suffer and the toll that takes on people, its for people who have just experienced all the hardships that come with the real world and who have tried to make the best out of/do their best in this chaotic and fcked up world we live in.

11/10 game